Abstract [en]

The purpose of this study is to increase understanding of what motivates volunteers and what their hopes and expectations are when they come to work at a music festival. We want to examine how motivation theories can be applied on this group of people and by that grasp how volunteers get motivated.

During our work with music festivals we realized that there is very little knowledge about the volunteers and how to best work with volunteers at a festival. One thing that particularly captured our interest was the discovery of how many of the volunteers who signed up to work at the festival and then totaly unannounced chose not to show up at the festival at all or to suspend their work during the festival.

This study attempts to shed light on this topic and contribute to more knowledge in this field, further more we also discovered that the difference between the supervisor and the volunteers’ attitude was not as great as we predicted. We found out that the supervisors’ awareness of the volunteers’ situation is a greater than initially observed, but that this knowledge infrequently converts into action.

We have examined the volunteers’ motivation and the supervisor's attitudes in order to understand what is causing the loss of volunteers during festivals, both before and during implementation. This paper is directed at people who have an interest in the phenomenon motivation of nonprofit workers.